Spectre’s Arcadia: The Dream of the Saint Hubert Plaza, 2018-2024
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This ambulatory work takes at its heart Montreal’s Plaza Saint-Hubert as a magical quétaine dreamland akin to Walter Benjamin’s beloved and perplexing Paris Arcades as it undergoes refurbishment. Distracted by a “failed” audio walk made for her doctoral thesis, the hunt for the dialectical image, and a scholarly trip to the UK to study audio walks from the 1990s and 2000s and explore questions of urban space and place (and questions of the heart), the narrator of Spectre’s Arcadia meets with Walter Benjamin himself on the Plaza Saint-Hubert, a street of “fruitful juxtapositions,” in the hopes of decoding the language of glass and steel presented by the Plaza’s (in)famous marquee. The work collects the voices and stories of people who have lived near the Plaza or observed its myriad transformations from the 1960s to the present day. There are essays—many originally written for courses or conferences—on the role of fashion in urban space, on the history of the Plaza’s 1920s “movie palace,” on Walter Benjamin’s dialectical image, and on the history (and utopic future) of the Plaza Saint-Hubert, embedded in the experimental prose. There are also walks, a tour of the Plaza, a walk along the M11 highway in East London wielding a radio receiver to experience Graeme Miller’s audio walk LINKED, a walk along the Thames river to hear Toby Butler’s “Drifting,” and a walk through Whitechapel to hear Janet Cardiff’s “The Missing Voice: Case Study B.” The narrator sees these audio walks as inspiration for her own and also as spectral narratives of walks that no longer exist as they once did. Spectre’s Arcadia exists within the constellation of academic dissertation, experimental New Narrative prose, theory, urban geography, oral history, fashion studies and poetry. This project mobilizes the moving bodies of the narrator, contributors and participants through the transforming Saint-Hubert Plaza as an instrument for introducing disequilibrium to traditional academic methods of “knowing” and “writing” a place.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.029 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".